First Impressions of Astro Web Framework

It was time for a change

When I first built this site, I was torn on how to approach it. At the time I was heavy into Drupal professionally, so I figured it would work well for my blog. However it seemed like overkill. This site was meant to always be a static blog with no complex interactions. So why throw a semi at such a simple use case?

After some contemplation, like collectively one hour of research scattered over multiple days, I went with Jekyll. I was hosting on GitHub so it made sense. But then I moved to Netlify. That alone doesn’t necessitate a rewrite, but the site had become a half-hearted Jekyll port of an even older iteration of the site (the CSS was atrocious, embarrassing really). I really needed to make that CSS cleaner. It haunted my dreams …

And then … I stumbled on Astro

It was by accident. I don’t even remember what I was researching at the time. It may have been a random article posted through daily.dev. At this point I am fully immersed in React land, so I only need something with a similar syntax or ecosystem. Astro Web Framework checked all the boxes:

• Static site generation
• Modern tooling
• Markdown files for article content
• React-like component syntax

I’m sold! One day later, the site is rebuilt and deployed. Could I have done it in a single night … sure … if I didn’t rewrite the about page. Gold plating, am I right? I can’t scope creep at work, so I guess I needed to do it in my off time (^_^)v

The framework does everything I want for now. Simple updates and easy expansion with many official integrations. Not bad for the effort put in.